Transcript

Anab Jain:

Even though, if you look around us, the way of the future or our present is unfolding is complex, messy, chaotic, turbulent. The trends reports and the kind of visions that are presented to us by those who have the power to present those visions are often clean, white, shiny, seductive. And unfortunately, the future is not going to be like that. It’s going to be standing on the bones of our actions and decisions that we’re making today. So I think if we are able to liberate ourselves from this shiny future idea, we might benefit a lot.

Aleks Krotoski:

Hello. You are listening to Standing on the Shoulders, a podcast about inspiring giants that have helped our guests, professional giants themselves, dream up new paths. Across these episodes, you’ll hear the stories of a number of thinkers and innovators, visionaries who somehow managed to see the world in a way that others just can’t. They tell us about key moments in their professional journeys, and they’ll talk about their greatest inspiration who helped them along their way. Hosted by me, Aleks Krotoski and supported by Pearson.

Aleks Krotoski:

Our guest today is Anab Jain. She is a designer, futurist, filmmaker, and writer, and she has spent the last 15 years gaining out of complex hypothetical futures. And what does that mean? Well, with her partner, the designer, Jon Ardern, she develops tools that help people to ask the right kinds of questions for living today and for living tomorrow. These are questions about wonderful and alarming things, from self-driving cars and dying bees to making blind people see. We wanted to know more so in our conversation Anab and I talked about the wild world of future-oriented thinking. First, I wanted to know if she had a unique perspective on what is to come as a futurist of color.

Aleks Krotoski:

I think one of your superpowers is your cross-cultural perspective, and that allows you to game out possible futures that don’t just come from the minds of your dominant white dude in Silicon Valley. Can you talk a little bit about having that cross-cultural perspective and how that does feed into your uniqueness within this design and speculative space?

Anab Jain:

I didn’t grow up with a lot of these popular back to the future comic books and Marvel. I didn’t grow up with the Western science fiction that a lot of kids grew up with. I grew up with Indian mythology and comic books, but they were like mythological characters and there were a lot about reincarnation. They were a lot about kind of weird beings and other worlds, and serpent gods and their underworlds, and the other kind of fire demons who had their own worlds. And there was this kind of storytelling that was multi-species.

Aleks Krotoski:

Anab thinks that growing up hearing all these multi-species stories with their multi-species heroism shaped her way of seeing how society lives together and progress is through collaboration and coexistence. She realizes that this makes her different from people who grew up listening to stories about one guy, and it’s usually a guy, killing off a monster and single-handedly saving the future

Anab Jain:

Different cultures think about human beingness in this world differently. It also makes me reflect that actually increasingly we are going to need to live in a world where human exceptionalism or individualism must give way to collaboration and networks of care and multi-species understanding and so on.

Aleks Krotoski:

And I noticed that you actually serendipitously fell into design. That wasn’t where you were originally going to be going. You were originally going to be going to medical school. Can you tell me a little bit about that experience, about why you decided to go into design rather than medicine? And at what point in your studies did you suddenly think, “Ah, this accident actually is a happy accident. This actually is a serendipitous thing, and I’m going to take this forward.”

Anab Jain:

Well, it’s interesting you allow me to realize I’m so old.

Aleks Krotoski:

Aren’t we all?

Anab Jain:

Oh, my God. School, those good, nice days. I think it was literally, it was an accident because I got admission into design school and they had a different set of criteria for you to start design college a lot earlier than the results for my levels [inaudible 00:05:36] came out. So I was already a month or two inside this wonderful design school environment. And I was really enjoying it. And luckily when my grades came out, my parents were not in town. They were abroad and I was living with my grandma. And I just had to tell her, she was very pleased and she was so excited I was going to medical school, and I just had to tell her I’m not, unfortunately, going to go to medical school. And she didn’t really have much of a voice in that decision. So I kind of made that decision and everyone else had to kind of inadvertently respect it.

Anab Jain:

Then, I suppose the turning point for me was actually decided that I actually didn’t want to go into design in its traditional sense but wanting to do filmmaking because that was one of the courses I could take. And just watching a lot of films from around the world and it was just like, wow, there’s all these words, and there’s all these ways of telling stories, and there’s all these kind of incredibly imaginative experiences that I just kind of got hooked.

Aleks Krotoski:

At what point did you realize that this was something that you could do as a career? Because going to film school, there’s a lot of expectation and hope, and then you graduate. And you’re like, “I make films.” Da-da. And people are like, “Yeah, you make films, now make some money.”

Anab Jain:

Yeah, exactly.

Aleks Krotoski:

At what point did you realize that design is something that you are going to be able to make it? Was it when you moved to London?

Anab Jain:

Yes, exactly. So basically I was pretty much what you described like, “Oh, yeah, I’m going to make films.” And when I graduated, “Oh, shit, I have no money.” It was like, okay, I can’t go to Bollywood because I’ll remain the fifth assistant director for another 20 years. So that’s when I applied to go to college and do my master’s. I was going to do communication design, but it was literally a day before submitting to the Royal College of Art I changed my mind again and decided to apply for interaction design. And I think that was perhaps the best decision I made. And I think going to the RCASG did change my life. It kind of brought all the things I was interested together in one space. I’m interested in working with people. I liked a bit of design, but I also like storytelling and I liked to make films. And it just kind of, the atmosphere, my colleagues, the tutors, it really had a big influence.

Aleks Krotoski:

For people who don’t know what interaction design is, can you describe what that means and how it’s put into practice?

Anab Jain:

I think interaction design today would be seen as somebody who designs quite specific interactions between people and technology, in a sense of anything from user interface design, to interactions between say smart objects or connected objects and people, connected products and so on. Whilst I suppose what we studied was a lot broader, it was more like, imagine this technology and then what would it mean to live with this technology, what world would we live in? So there was already these aspects of thinking about the future, to ask questions, like what-if, to consider unintended consequences. So it was, and there was making, and there was designing, but there was also a lot of contextual thinking and considering.

Aleks Krotoski:

During her two years at the Royal College of Art, Anab got really good at dreaming up those what if scenarios. She gravitated towards ideas about how people and technology could interface and found herself mixing with some of the most talented people in the UK tech scene. This led to positions at two of the top design-led tech groups, mobile phone company Nokia and Microsoft Research. Those were phenomenal labs at that time. I remember visiting them and being so enthused by what was coming out of those spaces. They had a different approach to creating interactions with devices. They were in many ways, thinking bigger. They were thinking about the contexts. Tell me a little bit about what you did at those places, what attracted you to them, and how that context has really informed what it is that you do today.

Anab Jain:

I think both the organizations had a really huge influence but in different ways. So I think with Nokia, it wasn’t so much the work I did, but the people I worked with. I think it was probably one of the best group of people I’ve ever worked with. There was such a lot of collaborative spirit and partnerships and kind of investigative thinking in that cohort of people that I brought to my own practice later on. Whilst at Microsoft research, my boss at the time was Alex Steele, who is a social scientist and I think he introduced me to a lot of really fascinating concepts in social sciences and around asking questions about things in so many different ways.

Aleks Krotoski:

An area that is close to my heart. The social science concepts helped to enrich the worlds that Anab was building and helped to make sense of and predict the interfaces that she was designing. So working with Alex Steele was a pivotal moment in her career.

Anab Jain:

I worked with him for almost two years at Microsoft Research. And already at that point, the briefs he would ask me to think about where like rethinking intelligence in the home, or what does it mean to live with intelligent things in the homes? We were talking about robot companions and so on. This was 10 years ago. So I think that was a huge influence in research-led methods, which brought in design but also brought in a lot of speculation. And I think that is also a completely irreplaceable experience.

Aleks Krotoski:

She played around with all kinds of prescient ideas from a robot that consumed and well, recycled organic waste to a world infused by RFID chip readers. After a few years at the lab, she was inspired to look a little further and in 2009, she formed her own group, Superflux with her partner, Jon Ardern. How did those experiences inform Superflux, your design lab?

Anab Jain:

I think he just kind of fell into a place where I chose to move out of a structured institution. I think one of the things I was really craving was autonomy. And it was also around the same time that my partner, Jon, who had a small startup himself, was also looking to do something like that. So I think we kind of informally collaborated on our first project in 2009. And I think it just took off from there. I think we both were pretty much recent graduates, so we hadn’t yet got into the kind of comfortable paycheck, secure life scenario. So we were in a shared house. We didn’t have any obligations apart from making sure we had money to pay the rent and food to eat, and so we could really explore, and experiment, and think, and build and sort of be remotely happily broke for a bit

Aleks Krotoski:

Happily, they didn’t have to stay broke for too long. They started to attract lots of great clients and collaborators. They dreamed up a camera that filmed in the fifth dimension with quantum physicists at the University of Oxford. They dreamed up pets that were powered by wifi, synthetic bees that would buzz around with natural ones. And they also worked with neuroprostheticists at New Castle University to conceptualize a latter-day miracle, helping those with degenerative eye conditions see again, through injectable viruses.

Aleks Krotoski:

Lots of Anab’s world-building work is inspired by something that we humans are geniuses at, world-destroying. For the past three years, her lab has been developing a research project called mitigation of shock, which takes a climate change altered future involving food and water scarcity and brings it home, literally

Anab Jain:

In this instance, we chose to invite people into something that they experience every day, their homes, a very domestic space. But set in the future, what would our homes look like and feel like in a world that has been severely impacted by climate change? And so we built this apartment and it was like a London apartment set around 2050 or so, when our son, Jon and my son, who was six at that point would be around our age. So it was far away in the future to affect an entirely new generation of people.

Aleks Krotoski:

The idea for this immersive project came from the philosopher, Timothy Morton.

Anab Jain:

Timothy Morton has all hyperobjects and he describes climate change is one of the hyperobjects, which are these kind of large, vast objects that go across time and space in a way that they are incomprehensible for people in their everyday lives. And so our thinking was that, how do we make this amorphous object visceral and tangible and experiential? And so we decided to do it through the lens of food shortage and food insecurities.

Aleks Krotoski:

So, she kitted out a theoretical apartment of the post-climate change future with inventions like nutrient charged fogs or food computers and mushroom farms. And it was as she was making friends with fungi that she came across the work of the anthropologist, Anna Tsing. Specifically, Anab found her book, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins.

Anab Jain:

In the book, she writes a lot about human disturbance or writes about the idea of disturbance, that sometimes disturbance doesn’t always have to be a negative thing and that how disturbances can help ecological systems. And so I was like, yeah, in some ways, these mushrooms that we moved around and perhaps caused positive disturbances, which led them to grow.

Aleks Krotoski:

There was something in this idea of destruction being creative, a productive force that Anab found particularly inspiring.

Anab Jain:

It just kind of, yeah, it took me to this space where I was like, yeah, I need to think about this a lot more, but this is exciting.

Aleks Krotoski:

Tsing’s book is about how the matsutake mushroom, the most valuable mushroom in the world, unites a mishmash of multi-species players along its commodity chain, Japanese gourmets, Hmong jungle fighters, Yi Chinese goat herders, and Finnish nature guides, and of course, the ecosystems of the forests where these mushrooms grow. Anab found a lot of things to get excited about in Tsing’s book. They called back to the multi-species stories of her childhood. But the thing that really stuck and has been an inspiration in her approach to thinking about the future is the vivid picture that Tsing sketches out of our hyper-connected planet. Specifically, what she draws on is the way that Tsing shows how life and great value can emerge from an ecologically disturbed landscape.

Anab Jain:

Some of the things that Tsing describes in her book like the nematodes of the pine trees, they fall at just the right time, it drops on the back of the sawyer beetle at just the right time so that the sawyer beetle can go and put it into this other pine tree, which nourishes that pine tree to grow.

Aleks Krotoski:

The mushroom book adds up to a pretty psychedelic vision of the relationship between humans and the world around us. And the more Anab looked into Tsing’s work, she realized how much she was able to understand about human expectations, our social systems, and our imagined futures.

Anab Jain:

And then you just think, oh, my God, everything is connected to everything else in this world.

Aleks Krotoski:

And now what she does is called multi-species ethnography.

Anab Jain:

This multi-species ethnography is just this kind of noticing and an understanding and acknowledgment that we are one of many of the species and we need to look at and kind of stay with these entanglements and observe them more closely and with nuance to see our own role in this world. So I think that’s how I see it anyway.

Aleks Krotoski:

In fact, she’s trying to magic-up a multi-species world in her studio right now.

Anab Jain:

So, we have mycelium soil and worm cast soil to grow other plant species and vegetation bearing in mind, soil health of companion species. And so everything we have right now growing in the studio, as I speak is kind of built around these natural ecosystems.

Aleks Krotoski:

Anab’s ideas make sense of complexity and entanglement, and they do so in an elegant and compelling way. But what she’s found is that the people who are charged with implementing the future, the politicians, are too entangled in their own complexity.

Anab Jain:

Unfortunately, for instance, when I talk to people within the government, I was doing a presentation to the Foreign Commonwealth Office last week, and everybody was on board, all the investors and directors are on board. But they’re all moving through such short political cycles that they are not able to make longterm decisions. That’s it, that we are trapped in a short-term political cycle. And unfortunately, a lot of the senior level people have very strong vested interests, and things need to change at that level.

Aleks Krotoski:

So I asked her how we build on messiness and complexity and entanglement. How do we convince the people who believe that innovation and change takes place in a sterile lab-like environment to recognize that they’re guinea pigs in wild experiments that are transformed by all sorts of forces, the social, the political, and the economic? I mean, it was a slightly ironic question because it was almost as if it was asking for that silver bullet anyway, where it’s like, well, what will change? But in fact, it is an entanglement, isn’t it? It needs to be the social, the cultural, the political, the economic, all of these different aspects of change that are sometimes in tandem and sometimes they work at opposite ends. And so, therefore, the idea of creating change, greeting innovation in a almost sterile environment is not possible because we don’t live in a sterile environment. Is that as sort of a good interpretation of what you’re saying?

Anab Jain:

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

Aleks Krotoski:

That’s all for this episode of Standing on the Shoulders. Thank you very much for listening. To find out more about Anab Jain and her studio Superflux, go to superflux.im. For more on Anna Tsing, her mushroom book and links to other references from this episode, go to standingontheshoulders.net.

Aleks Krotoski:

Standing on the Shoulders is a Storythings production. This episode was written and produced by Shruti Robindron. Our audio engineer and sound designed was by [Kaine Scarlet 00:20:39]. Additional interviews were by Eloise Stevens. Social media by Kate Norton. Artwork by Darren Garrett and Eden Brackenbury. Our executive producers are Hugh Garry and Caroline Leary. It’s supported by Pearson. And it’s hosted by me, Aleks Krotoski. It takes a lot of time and a big team of people to make this podcast, more than most people would imagine. So if you liked the show, please go to Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you go to get your podcast fix and rate it. It really does help people to discover us. Thanks for listening.